Pros

Cons

Bottom Line

The Onyx Boox Max 3 is the most powerful, versatile E Ink Android tablet we've seen, but whether it successfully runs the apps you need is a gamble.

Oct. 5, 2019

Large-format E Ink tablets are a thing. They're expensive, and they're for specialized use. We've reviewed Sony's Digital Paper lineup, which is designed for people who need to read large-format PDFs, like academic journals, legal decisions, or even sheet music. The pricey, 13.3-inch Boox Max 3 ($859), like its predecessor, takes things a step further with full Android capabilities, so it can run Kindle, Kobo, and Nook reading apps, as well as surf the web. It's hackable in all the best ways: You can tweak a ton of settings, sideload your own apps and files, and generally mess around to your heart's content. But the combination of full Android and E Ink is a kludge, so you'll be wrestling with a fair share of bugs.

Maximum Size, Minimum Weight

For a tablet so large, the Boox Max 3 is shockingly slim and light, at 12.2 by 8.9 by 0.3 inches (HWD) and 17.3 ounces. It's clad in smooth white plastic, with a completely flat-front E Ink screen.

There's a power button on the top. A main button, below the screen, functions as a home/back button and has a fingerprint sensor for unlocking. On the bottom, there's a USB-C port, as well as a micro HDMI input port for the (admittedly weird) function of using the screen as a secondary monitor. The USB-C port works for charging and syncing, but it also has OTG capabilities so you can add a full keyboard or other USB accessories. The tablet has a speaker, but volume control is handled through software.

The 13.3-inch, 2,200-by-1,650 E Ink screen has 16 shades of gray. It's very sharp, as well as very user-tunable, much more than other E Ink devices I've seen. You can change the refresh rate, the contrast, and the number of page flips before a full refresh. However, there's no front light, so you won't be able to see the screen in the dark. Whether ghosting is a problem depends on how much black your content uses and how you've tuned the settings. I saw noticeable ghosting on a CBR of the comic book Saga, but not on books that are mostly text or diagrams.

The tablet comes with a white plastic active stylus, which doesn't need a battery. There's nowhere to put the stylus when it's not in use. Like the previous Boox Max 2, it also has a regular, finger-friendly touch screen.

Inside, the Max 3 runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor—a decent midrange mobile chip—with a sensible 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. Startup takes a long time, up to a minute. The tablet is responsive after that, though.

There's dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi, which works well, as well as Bluetooth 4.1. Onyx doesn't provide a usage estimate for the 4,300mAh battery, but it has lasted me for well over a week of regular use.

The tablet doesn't feel fragile, but the screen flexes slightly when you draw on it. There's not a super-tough screen protector, and I can't find an aftermarket model. Unsurprisingly, the Max 3 isn't waterproof.

It Reads Anything

Onyx has its own bookstore, but it's all just freeware content that's out of copyright. So it's good that the tablet's simple, clear UI prioritizes access to your own content, no matter how you've acquired it.

Documents stored in the Books folder of the tablet's drive show up on the Library tab, and I had no trouble displaying a wide range of formats: EPUB and MOBI books, PDF music scores and scentific reports, and a CBR (but not CBZ) comic, for example. If you need proprietary formats, like Kindle DRM, you can read them in third-party apps.

The reading app has lots of options. You can scrub through pages, search for words, or jump to EPUB chapter markers. There are dozens of fonts in more than a dozen sizes. You can read in single-page portrait mode or dual-page landscape mode. You can keep multiple documents open in tabs, and auto-advance pages on a timer (great for musicians). You can click to get your books read out to you in female or male text-to-speech voices. The one common feature I don't see, ironically, is bookmarking. It's probably in there, somewhere.

This is a great device for taking notes and sketching, too. The pen on the screen has a pleasing matte feel, and it's as responsive as any E Ink device I've used. It's still not as sharp as an LCD-based, high refresh rate screen, but I find it very, very nice to use. You can write or draw in four shades of gray and three colors, insert pictures to annotate, and export to PDF or PNG. You can create multi-page notes just by swiping. There's an entertaining AI-based handwriting recognition function that tries to boil down your handwriting to text; like most of these systems, it mostly works.

I took notes on both this tablet and a 12.9-inch iPad Pro, and I prefer the Onyx. Color tablets are better for painting and color artwork, of course, but for basic sketching and notes, nothing beats the restfulness of E Ink. It's important to note that the pen pretty much only works in the built-in note-taking program. While I was able to download other, supposedly E Ink-friendly apps, they were all too laggy to use.

I might as well also mention the HDMI monitor function. Plug in via HDMI, and the Max 3 becomes a monitor for your PC. The low refresh rates are kind of insane, however. So what is it really good for? If you want to read something in E Ink that's in a format the tablet can't support, but which there's a PC app for. But other than sheer curiosity, you very likely won't use this feature.

An Interesting Android

The Boox Max 3 runs Android 9.0. Unfortunately, according to Onyx, Google refuses to certify it because the E Ink screen's refresh rate is too low. The tablet comes with its own slightly sketchy store, run by Onyx, which has APK apps that are clearly ripped off of Google Play. Still though, a lot of what you want as in an ebook reader is in there, such as the key Kindle-Kobo-Nook triumvirate, all of which work well, and some comic book readers.

Alternate note-taking software doesn't fare as well. Evernote and OneNote, which are both in Onyx's store, install and run on the tablet, but there's so much lag when inking with the pen that they're totally useless.

Putting Google Play on the tablet involves watching a 30-second video entirely in Japanese, then clicking through a bunch of screens and entering a long number from an earlier screen. At that point, the Play store works...somewhat. Some apps install. Some don't. Sometimes the store just quits when you click Install on something.

The New York Times app installed and looks gorgeous—it's amazing, like reading a magic print newspaper. The Guardian app did not install. TikTok did (and E Ink TikTok videos are weird). Adobe Sketch did not. Gmail installed, but I had to find a really obscure Google account setting for "allowing less-secure apps" to make it refresh. Dropbox and OneDrive both worked (and made it easy to transfer files on and off the tablet). It's really a roll of the dice.

It's easier to install the Amazon Appstore—just search Google for it and download it—but there are similar app-by-app compatibility issues. The Washington Post app looks great. But the VIZ Manga app has display problems that make it unusable.

Running TikTok let me play with some of the tablet's stranger settings, like the ability to change the screen's refresh rate. You can reduce the refresh rate to reduce ghosting, or increase it to make video work. You can also embolden app fonts, and whiten out dark backgrounds.

There are other bugs. Most annoyingly, the Wi-Fi kept on turning off. You just have to tap the icon to turn it back on, but it'll continue to turn off without warning. And at one point the keyboard started defaulting to Chinese. These are issues that can hopefully be ironed out in firmware updates.

Conclusions

The Onyx Boox Max 3 is a gorgeous device for reading and taking notes. It's delightfully flexible and content-neutral, able to dip into any ecosystem, which makes it far superior to Sony's PDF-only Digital Paper line. And even some Android app support is more than anyone else in the E Ink world has to offer right now.

It's $859, of course, so you should only get it if you need, specifically, what it can do. Are you just reading PDFs and taking notes? The Sony Digital Paper is $600. Are you only taking notes? The Remarkable is $500. Do you just want a slightly larger than usual ebook reader? The Kobo Forma is $250. There's also the older Boox Max2, selling for $699, but I can't recommend an Android 6 device right now in terms of app compatibility or security.

On the other hand, if you need to run the Kindle app on a large-format ebook reader, this is the device for you. If you want to synchronize your sketches easily with Dropbox, OneDrive, or other common cloud software, the Boox Max 3 has unparalleled flexibility. If you're looking for a general-purpose computing device but have a problem with LCDs, get out that credit card. There are countless potential app-based uses here—if your app runs, that is.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.

Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed to the Frommer's series of travel guides and Web sites for more than a decade. Other than his home town of New York, his favorite … See Full Bio